Word: aria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opening chorus of Bleib bei uns (BWV 6) featured a large number of choral trills. Although they demonstrated the chorus's virtuosity, the emphasis placed upon them distorted rather than heightened the expression of Bach's musical ideas. In the remainder of the cantata, Jane Struss' alto aria was lucid and delicate, if not overpowering, and Sorensen gracefully navigated the difficult tenor aria...
...Herr denket" did, however, suffer slightly through being somewhat uniform in sound, especially since the entire soprano section sang the soprano aria, and all the men sang the tenor-bass duet, for no apparent reason. Part of the function of these solos is to break up the homogeneity of the choral sound, and though the chorus sang lightly and clearly enough to prevent their sounding rough or gross, the listener missed the delicate sound of individual voices singing ornate lines clearly intended for solo performance...
...stage of opera for more than 100 years, until the end of the 18th century, constituted about 70% of all male singers. They postured and strutted on the stage like peacocks improvising elaborate vocal filigrees, inserting grace notes or unaccompanied passages, some of which lasted as long as the aria itself. They combined the range of the female voice with the power of the male, interposing a dizzying array of appoggiaturas, mordents, cadenzas, slides, slurs, shakes, trills, turns and leaps. For tonal purity, flexibility precision and breath control, it was a display of vocal acrobatics that has never been equaled...
When she was twelve, her stepfather, "a whiz at selling anything," got Julie a spot with the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome. On her first night she stopped the show with an incredible F above high ¶in Titania's aria in Mignon. Immediately, her parents' agent, "Uncle Charlie" Tucker, moved in, arranged to get Julie's buckteeth straightened. Within a year, she was belting out her "bastardized opera" in a special command performance. "You sang beautifully, Julie," Her Majesty, now the Queen Mother, told her. She had become, at 13, the family...
...copyist whose job it is to decipher the scribblings of composers. He works in a dingy cubbyhole on Manhattan's upper West Side, surrounded by towering stacks of music and a massive duplicating machine named Ozalid. Together they make a unique team: Arnie singing an aria from La Bohème while bent over a new score, Ozalid humming contentedly and smelling of ammonia. Yet despite the humble trappings, for the past 25 years Arnstein's office has been the musical clearinghouse for practically every major U.S. composer...